Applying geoscience to Australia's most important challenges

Citation

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Abstract

Geoscience Australia conducted a marine survey to provide seabed environmental information to support the assessment of the
CO2 storage potential of the Vlaming Sub-Basin. The survey was undertaken under the Australian Government's National CO2 Infrastructure
Plan (NCIP) to help identify sites suitable for the long term storage of CO2.
The major aim of this survey was to look for evidence of any gas fluid seepage at the seabed and wether the location had faults
that have been identified in a number of seismic lines. The survey also mapped seabed biota in the area of interest to indentify
any biota communities that are related with seepage. This research addresses key questions of the regional seal integrity
of the Southern Perth Shale and the potential for storing of CO2 in the Early Cretaceous Gage Sandstone.
The survey was conducted by Fugro's Southern Supporter in the Vlaming Sub-Basin, North and South of Rotnest Island between
the period of the 17th of March to the 20th of April 2012.
Shallow seismic sub bottom profiler data were acquired as well as high resolution multibeam bathymetry and backscatter data
during the survey.

Date (publication)

Product Type

Topic Category

Keywords

Resource Language

Resource Character Set

utf8

Resource Security Classification

unclassified

Geographic Extent

North bound

-31.79

East bound

115.74

West bound

115.24

South bound

-32.35

TEMPORAL EXTENT

2012-03-17 / 2012-04-20

Lineage

The Vlaming Sub-Basin survey, GA-0334 GP1373 was acquired by Geoscience Australia onboard the RV Southern Supporter from the
17th of March to the 20th of April 2012.
The GA representative onboard was Mr. George Bernardel.
This dataset was acquired and processed onboard by Fugro and further reprocessing of the data was conducted in the office
by Cameron Buchanan and by Michele Spinoccia, using CARIS HIPS & SIPS ver 7.1.2.
The naming of the raw bathymetry data had to be changed to show the date, time and vessel.
Then the timing of the raw and the processed data needed to matched as the raw and processed bathymetry data timing did not
match.
Then the navigation for different files/days were missing and needed to be loaded and merged with the rest of the dataset.
1. First a vessel configuration file was created where the co-ordinates of the motion sensor and DGPS antenna and patch test
offsets were recorded.
2. A new project was then created and the vessel configuration file was attached to the project file.
3. The raw swath sonar data, in raw.all format, for each line was then imported into the project and the vessel information
assigned to the data.
4. The motion sensor, DGPS and heading data were then cleaned using a filter that averaged adjacent data to remove artifacts.
5. Different sound velocity profiles data for each block were attached to the corresponding raw swath sonar data files to
correct the depths for changes in the speed of sound through the water column.
6. Then a new blank field area was defined that specified the geographic area of study and the co-ordinate system used. The
co-ordinates for the study areas were WGS84 UTM-50S.
7. The data was cleaned by applying several filters that removed any remaining spikes in the bathymetry data using user defined
threshold values. A visual inspection of the data for each line was then undertaken where artifacts and noisy data not removed
by the filtering process were removed manually using Swath and subset editors modules of the Caris HIPS/SIPS software.
8. All the data for each bathymetric, motion sensor, DGPS, heading, tide and sound velocity profile data were merged to produce
the final processed data file. A weighted grid of the processed data was then created for each Block.
In GA the tide was applied to the grid to correct for tidal variations and velocity corrections were performed to correct
for different artifacts and mismatches.
9. The processed data was finally exported as grids soundings or false colored images for presentation and reporting and as
final processed data in in ASCII XYZ as well as geotif formats of 50m resolution.
10-Using CARIS Base editor 4.0 the grids were exported as ESRI ASCII grid, then imported into ARC catalogue/info to create
a raster file for the entire survey.